“I am excited to move the WOMEN/SV program to Family & Children Services of Silicon Valley,” Patrick said. “FCS has the resources and reputation in the field of family violence prevention to enhance our program, help more victims find a path to freedom and continue the conversation on domestic violence in our communities.”

Patrick, who founded her organization in 2012 with a grant from the Los Altos Community Foundation, distinctly recalled the difficulty some students had paying attention in her class one day.

“Some of them were thinking about what was going on at home – the trauma and the chaos they were living in on a day-to-day business,” said Patrick, whose organization offers a range of support services for abused women in Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and other surrounding cities. “How can you pay attention when you’re thinking about how dad treats mom, or vice versa?”

Hear about the Women-Of-Means Escape Network. Ruth Patrick will talk about the many forms domestic violence takes and what it looks like in affluent areas. Also, why women stay, red flags that signal abusive behavior, the impact it has on women and children, and the resources available to help them.

Los Altos is a wonderful place to raise a family. We generally are acquainted with our next-door neighbors and can’t help but run into someone we know when we go shopping or out to eat. And how many towns are like ours – where you can walk your dog at night and not be looking over your shoulder?

Los Altos is one of the safest towns in the country and one of the most beautiful. It’s truly a blessing to call it home.

Yet as safe and friendly and beautiful as our town is, it is not immune to a problem that affects one in four women in our country: domestic violence.

Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science. Welcome to tomorrow. Isn’t technology wonderful–as long as it’s in the right hands!

Check out this scary video. MIT, Microsoft and Adobe collaborate to demonstrate how you can use everyday objects like plants, a bag of chips, a pair of ear buds to extract sound, taking the minute vibrations caused by sound waves and translating them back into the speech or music that produced them. Yes a plant or a bag of chips can sing ‘Mary had a little lamb.” It can also repeat rants and threats.

Someone could point a camera through a soundproof window at a plant near where an abuser was ranting at his partner, and later, through the footage capturing the minute vibrations of the nearby plant or bag of chips, one could recover what was said.

And an abuser could orchestrate an event to get his partner worked up/angry/distraught then capture it and use it out of context to cast doubt on her character/emotional stability.

“While some would rather suffer through the abuse in silence, hiding their pain from everyone they know, secret-sharing Whisper app has become a place for those who aren’t ready to speak aloud to share their experiences anonymously.”

According to a recent report by the American Bar Association Commission on Domestic Violence, Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner in the United States.

WOMEN SV Director, Ruth Patrick, has been invited to present at the annual Domestic Violence Conference on October 3, sponsored by the Santa Clara County Domestic Violence Council. More details as they become available.

She has also been chosen by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors to join a task force studying ways to improve policies and procedures around intimate partner violence.